With more than 110,000 expected attendees, IMTS is Chicago’s hottest suburb this week.

We arrived in Chicago over the weekend to luxuriously appointed accommodations and much fanfare (that’s how it is when you’re the cast and crew of the No. 1 talk show in the quality industry).

In “Data Snooping Part 1” (Quality Digest, Aug. 6, 2018) we discovered the basis for the first caveat of data snooping.

In February 1990, W.

Mary Parker Follett, a pioneering business consultant, was asked to help a troubled window shade company. The company’s thinking was narrow and limited. When asked to define their business, they said, “We produce window shades.”

IMTS is almost here, so we previewed the show, considered an important industry-academia partnership within manufacturing, and asked serious questions about the nature of motivation. Let’s take a look:

 IMTS Preview

This week’s show contained a range of fun and interesting content from some of our favorite corners of the world of quality. Here’s what we covered:

During the past decade, advances in understanding of cancer biology have led to the development of targeted treatments that are more effective than the chemotherapies of the past century.

T

he federal government just made it a lot easier to form an employee-owned business.

The way we traditionally define what it means to be brave can be our greatest obstacle. Simply shifting our focus can be the gateway to powerful results.